[New-Poetry] Camlle Paglia explains how she saved poetry

[Halvard Johnson]

Maybe you mean that nothing INTERESTING can be proven, James. Of course,
value judgments can't be proven, whether related to poems, poetry, or  
anything
else. Nor can another kinds of judgments. They can be supported, of  
course,
but men can be hanged based on judgments that, like any other  
judgments, cannot
be proven.

Back in the day, when I was teaching, I used to try to get writing  
students beyond
the quick and easy judgments that all too often blocked further  
consideration of a
poem by asking them to start with what they saw in a poem, rather than  
what they
thought about the poem. There are factual matters: e.g. length of  
lines, number of
beats, number of words, presences of tropes of various kinds. (Not  
that even the
number of words might not at times be a matter of judgment rather than  
fact.)

Of course, one of the things good critics (even student critics) ought  
to know is
the difference between matters of fact and matters of opinion or  
matters of
judgment.

Ergo . . .

Hal

". . . the old is too old and the new is too old."
                               --Gertrude Stein

Halvard Johnson
================
halvard at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/index.html
http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
http://www.hamiltonstone.org
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard/vidalocabooks.html


On Nov 15, 2008, at 5:34 PM, JforJames at aol.com wrote:

> I didn't have a chance to read the whole piece till yesterday, and  
> it looks like I'm of the minority viewpoint, but I think that Paglia  
> did a good job defending the poems she picked for her anthology.  
> Opinion is all critics have in the end...there is no proof as I said  
> today after reading the piece: http://ursprache.blogspot.com/
> She laid out her opinions on poetry quite nicely, I thought. (And  
> she's obviously not intimidated or held hostage to careerist  
> niceties so much that she's dissuaded from expressing displeasure at  
> 'name poets'. Which I find refreshing.)
> The other thing I think this piece points to is how much the  
> 'anthology pieces' we know come to us as received icons.
> The poems are not questioned. Not interrogated. They were taught to  
> as 'canonical' or a certain poetry interest group
>  has 'vested' them and they go on, living-dead zombie poems pushed  
> forward through time without question,
> Finnegan
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: TheOldMole <Opus40-01 at opus40.org>
> Sent: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:08 pm
> Subject: [New-Poetry] Camlle Paglia explains how she saved poetry
>
> http://www.bu.edu/arion/Paglia16-2.html
>
> I was shocked and disappointed by what I found. Poem after poem, wh  
> en approached from the perspective of the general audience rather  
> than that of academic criticism, shrank into inconsequence or  
> pretension. Or poets whom I fondly remembered from my college and  
> graduate school studies turned out to have produced impressive  
> bodies of serious work but no single poem that could stand up as an  
> artifact to the classic poems elsewhere in the book. The ultimate  
> standard that I applied in my selection process was based on William  
> Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” a masterpiece of sinewy modern  
> English.
>
> Ezra Pound, because of his generous mentoring of and vast influence  
> on other poets (such as T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams),  
> should have been automatically included in /Break, Blow, Burn/. But  
> to my dismay, I could not find a single usable Pound poem—just a  
> monotonous series of showy, pointless, arcane allusions to prior  
> literature. The equally influential W. H. Auden was high on my  
> original list. But after reviewing Auden’s collected pxoetry, I was  
> stunned to discover how few of his poems can stand on their own in  
> today’s media-saturated cultural climate.
>
> -- Tad Richards 
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